Bond forged beneath the earth

As rescuers struggle at a Utah collapse, West Virginia coal miners offer their prayers and go once more into the dark

August 23, 2007|By Kirsten Scharnberg, Tribune national correspondent

WELCH, W.Va. — Jim Sanson, a coal miner whose other calling in life might have been as an evangelical preacher, led his colleagues in somber prayer before they descended hundreds of feet into the earth.

"Lord, we pray this day that no one would be lost," Sanson intoned one recent morning, as the miners around him bowed their heads outside the Pinnacle mine near here.

The men prayed there would be no injuries. They prayed safety would be at the front of everyone's minds for the coming eight-hour shift. And they prayed, as they had for two weeks straight, for six miners lost in Utah and their increasingly grief-stricken families.

Since Aug. 6, the day a colossal mine collapse swallowed a group of miners in Huntington, Utah, the nation has watched, hoping a miracle might happen and the men could be pulled alive from the Crandall Canyon mine. The tragedy has sparked a national dialogue about one of the most dangerous professions in America, about laws that could make mining safer, about whether a rescue attempt that cost three men their lives should have been undertaken in that unstable Utah mine.

But unnoticed, all across America, in the hollows of West Virginia and the mountains of Kentucky, in the hills of southern Illinois and the gorges of Montana, tens of thousands of coal miners in this country have quietly continued to do what they do 365 days a year: quarry the depths of the earth for the billions of tons of coal that create more than half of the nation's electricity.

These miners work their shifts and return home to communities much like Huntington, quiet places where parents, spouses and children have for generations lived with the unsettling knowledge that their family's livelihood is fraught with peril, sometimes death. They take great pride in their occupation, putting bumper stickers with sayings such as "Miners go deeper" on their pickup trucks and reminding outsiders that increased attention to safety has made disasters like Utah's rare. They pray.

"Coal miners always pray for other coal miners," said an emotional Tom Morsi, a 30-year veteran of the mines, mentioning the Utah accident as well as one in China, where 181 miners were likely killed last week.

Martha Moore, the mayor of Welch, a town of 2,800 people just a few miles from the Pinnacle mine, put it like this: "I think there's a spot in our hearts for anything that happens in a coal mining town."

Indeed, at Pinnacle -- an otherworldly maze of underground tunnels almost the size of Washington, D.C., where workers do deep, room-and-pillar mining similar to the mining at Crandall Canyon -- miners have been watching the events in Utah between shifts with well-trained eyes. The workers at Pinnacle, considered to have the top mine rescue team in the nation, suspect the six didn't survive the initial collapse, but they feel severe offense at the suggestion that the bodies of the men might lie forever in the mine. Late Wednesday, Crandall Canyon's chief backed away from comments that the lost men might never be recovered and promised to keep searching for them.

They mourn the potential loss of experienced miners and worry that the industry will suffer yet more accidents in coming years as veterans retire and leave the mines to a new crop of inexperienced "red caps," the moniker given to new miners because of the distinctive color of their hard hats.

'It tears you up'

But mostly they talk about the sorrow they know has settled over the community of Huntington, an anguish they understand only too well from accidents in their own state -- like the haunting one last year when their rescue team tried but couldn't save two men trapped in a massive underground coal fire in a nearby mine. Some men of Pinnacle still weep when they talk about that accident, heartbreaking tears that trail through the black coal dust coating their faces.

"It tears you up because you think about accidents every day you leave your home in the morning. There's never a guarantee that it won't be the last time," Morsi said.

Spouses of miners live with that every day, but many, like Susan Plumley, wife of a veteran miner on Pinnacle's rescue team, profess the value of the work. "I always will support him being part of the mining community," Plumley said, "because I think he is such a positive influence on it."

To be sure, death is a constant presence in places like McDowell County, where many Pinnacle miners live. The county's Web site does not sugar coat the profession: "Since the first coal mining in the 1800s, McDowell County ... has suffered more mine disasters than any county in the state," the site reads. "These disasters, mostly mine explosions, accounted for over 500 fatalities from 1902 to 1964."

A sign in front of a church is even more pointed: "Are you ready to die?" it asks people in cars passing by, many them miners on their way to work.